


Projection

by whereismygarden



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Library, M/M, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 19:40:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3822427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The AU where Rush and Young run a library together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Projection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Potboy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/gifts).



> So a while ago, there was a post going round tumblr and Potboy expressed a desire for an AU with Rush and Young as angry librarians.

                There’s only so much of the monthly budget meeting bickering he can endure before he wants to give into his urge to scream. Camile, damn her, simply comes in to talk about how she’s “not hopeful” about next year’s funding, though somehow the student center folks have a whole complement of new computers, while they’re staggering along with the i2 processors in most of their work space.

                Fundamentally, most of the budget is just checking off their ragtag complement of graduate students and undergrads who shelve and run the circulation desk salaries’, the utilities and services that quite frankly should be the responsibility of the university to manage, and other things that aren’t negotiable. The real fighting is over journal subscriptions, when they have a thousand dollars less and the claws come out. Young came prepared, today, with a list and a pen and a calm look on his face. Rush tries not to grind his teeth as Camile tells them that they have to take a cut.

                Young looks pissed, too, as much as he ever has any emotions. The man is built like a hockey player, and has the harsh looking face to go with it. The only incongruous thing about him is his head of curly hair and his profession. When Jackson left for a better university, Young came in to replace him. That was before the funding had gone to shit: Rush thinks that Jackson would have been just as ready to fight.

                “You can’t possibly be serious in saying that this ridiculous, obscure rag on—“ he looks down to check—“medieval _sermon_ studies is more important than the Canadian Journal of Zoology.” Young gives him a sour look.

                “You’re woefully underinformed, as usual, about the studies of _any_ of the humanities students at this university.”

                “I’m underinformed? I’m not canceling our subscription when there’s clearly something expendable that can go.” Young’s face darkens.

                “There are two students finishing dissertations on medieval religious practices currently, and I’m not letting this go.”

                “We can get it on interlibrary loan if they need it so much. And don’t tell me I can do the same, because no one studying _medieval religion_ is crunched for time the way the students doing experimental work are.” He puts his most emphatic sneer on ‘medieval religion’ because what a pointless way to spend one’s time.

                “Fuck you: we have all the back copies of this _in print_ here, and you can scan them for people!” Young growls. “Our subscription is electronic only, they will lose access to a much greater degree.”

                “Gentlemen, please,” Camile says, leaning forward. The fury in Young’s eyes diminishes a little. “Find a third option.”

~

                Young keeps the office neater than Jackson ever did, but that’s about the only thing that can be said for him. He comes in at nine oh five every morning, his hair still drying off from his shower. He knows the man goes to the gym on east campus every morning, because he always has a bag with dirty clothes in it, and is always in a good mood from the endorphin rush. In the winter, his wet hair gets little ice crystals in it and he brushes them off onto the carpet of the office.

                Rush can’t imagine spending his time exercising with machines when he can go for a walk and read at the same time, but he presumes there must be some form of entertainment at the gym, such as watching a mindless sports program or talking with the self-absorbed people there. Young, for all that he has ridiculous habits, is an intelligent man. Why he didn’t shake them as he grew out of his adolescence is a mystery.

                Today he puts his battered red bag, with its faint whiff of old sweat, far too close to Rush’s side of the office.

                “Put that in a plastic bag and seal it or get it away from me, please,” he says, gathering up his paperwork to do in case there’s a lull at the reference desk. Young looks at him, having sprawled into his chair and not seeming keen to leave it.

                “You’re about to step out,” he says. As if his revolting clothes won’t be there all day, dispersing their odor. Rush rolls his eyes, shoves the bag with his foot towards Young, and strides out.

                The reference desk isn’t busy until ten or so, when anxious undergrads who’ve all been assigned a paper for their anthropology class come as an apparently mindless group. He gives them the floor and call numbers for their subject and sends them off. The next few people are all harried lab employees trying to find protocols published in 1989 to photocopy, and all they want is to save thirty seconds of looking up what section of the stacks they need to find.

                He has cataloguing to do, and hands the desk off to Young at eleven, only to be interrupted by him at eleven twenty.

                “Dr. McKay needs something that I can’t help him with.” He probably didn’t try very hard, but in this case, Rush can’t blame him. McKay has a huge ego that he only half deserves and an abrasive temper. He sends him off with the journals he needs, though the likelihood of him actually finishing his ‘comprehensive’ review on wormhole theory before Dr. Carter publishes again seems low. She’s been sending veritable flocks of students to do reading on obscure topics lately. Rush doesn’t share this information with McKay, letting him swagger off with his materials unconcerned about being scooped.

                “You don’t like him anymore than I do,” Young says, after McKay’s left the building. Rush sniffs. Even arguing with Young isn’t enough incentive to say anything nice about McKay.

                “Don’t you have work to do?” he says, striding back to the office and leaving Young to the desk. He reheats a container of rice and vegetables in the microwave and has lunch while he makes notes on some new books and works on a polite letter to the funding office.

~

                Young invites him to the gym one day.

                “As a staff member of the university, I can go to the gym whenever I like,” he says. Young folds his arms.

                “Do you ever go?” Rush gives him a flat look, trying to determine if he’s being serious. He has an impressive poker face, and his hazel eyes are currently unreadable.

                “No,” he says.

                “So why don’t you come with me sometime? Exercise is good for you.” Young, as if to demonstrate the benefits, puts one arm on the opposite post of the door he’s standing in and leans. He does have impressive arms, but Rush has no desire to develop his own via repetitive weight-lifting. “Makes your mood better.”

                “What would improve my mood is you, going away so I can work,” he says acidly. Young instead sits down at his desk and takes out an apple.     

                “Mood,” he says quietly, but there’s definitely amusement in his voice. Rush is, unfortunately for him, not in a state to appreciate teasing. He walks out of the office, taking his work to the reference desk and ignoring the slightly alarmed look he gets from Eli, the latest undergrad willing to sit behind the circulation desk and alternatively check books out and point to the reference desk.

                He and Young are at least in agreement that Eli is a good kid and a good employee, despite being an overly talkative pain in the ass, so he gets more hours than their other student employees.

                Young emerges from the office in a bad mood himself an hour later, and starts griping about the interlibrary loan process from the big libraries. Rush can’t blame him for that, because they are so stingy about shipping journals and books that he’s sometimes reduced to shouting when requests aren’t filled for weeks. Young banned him from making follow-up calls, with the result that he has to make them all himself. He doesn’t keep the complaints up for long, though, and spends the rest of the afternoon glowering and working at the reference desk without speaking.

                This is ideal, and they make a good amount of progress on cataloguing the pile of dissertations that need to be added to the collection.

                The next day, Young doesn’t invite him to the gym again, just says, “I don’t doubt that I could outrun you over distance, but I’d be interested to see how you sprint. You could possibly be better.” Rush turns to look at him, unable to help himself from evaluating that statement. He is quick, but Young has a lot of upper body strength that’s obvious from his build, and people like that are good sprinters.

                “Middle distance,” he says, and Young shakes his head and actually smiles his genuine smile at him for a second.

~

                Friday mornings they never assign Eli shifts, because the building is basically barren except for the few people who come to use the computers on the first floor. Rush takes one of the carts to the third floor stacks to do shelving, and, apparently with no paperwork to do, Young comes with him.

                “Hardly anyone comes into the stacks,” Young says. “Do you ever wonder about how often students have sex up here?” Rush, in the middle of putting a book back between two others where there is limited space, nearly drops it.

                “I never have,” he replies acidly. “Did you spend a lot of your time as a student fucking in libraries?”

                “I’m sure they do,” Young continues, not responding to his comment and not sounding disturbed at the possibility. “In the study carrels at least.”

                “I’m sure they don’t,” Rush says, nettled. He really hopes they don’t, or at least that he never finds out.

                “People get passionate around books,” Young says mildly. Rush picks another book off the cart and finds it belongs a full shelf over, and walks away. Young makes an amused sound like a cross between a laugh and a hum, and picks up some others.

                “Why are you bringing this up, anyway?” Rush asks him. “Is your wish to have sex with me just that intense, but you can’t articulate it like a normal person?”

                “What?” Young says, his face genuinely confused. He lifts one eyebrow at Rush. Fuck. Is that displacement, or transference? He’s just committed some obvious sin of discredited psychiatry. He keeps talking, just in case he can fix it.

                “It’s pretty normal to process feelings of attraction that you’re not feeling up to admitting as rivalry or antagonism.” He folds his arms. Young gives him a look, and he tries not to let his embarrassment show on his face.

                “Is that so?”

                “Yes,” he says.

                “Are you sure that’s normal?” He blinks, not having expected that reply.

                “What the fuck is your point?”

                “You just always seem to like to distinguish yourself from what’s normal,” Young says, and fuck him. Rush hates to be laughed at, even if he did just accidentally—well, not reveal himself, but imply—anyway, fuck Young.

                “Why don’t you fuck off downstairs?” he says.

                “Oh come on, I never said I wouldn’t have sex with you. You’re the one who decided to make everything tense for ten months.”

                “ _I_ made things tense--?” he sputters for a second, but Young just smiles at him, knowingly, and okay, maybe his quick dislike of the man can be partially attributed to what’s turning fast into hunger inside him. He swallows, looks away, looks back, and lets himself turn warm with noticing, properly, the look of his arms and the disheveled mess of his hair and the blunt, attractive lines of his face. His whole body feels overwarm and his heartbeat is far too fast.

                “A little,” Young says. “How do you feel about the sex, then?” Rush looks up to meet his eyes, which are far hotter and more intent than he’s ever seen them before, at least outside the context of a funding argument.

                “However inane the habit may be, I do have a certain appreciation for the fact that you go to the gym,” he says, and Young shakes his head.

                “Anyone ever tell you you’re a lot of work?” he says, setting a book into its place.

                “Not in so many words,” he replies, still trying to work past the slurry of nerves and attraction in his stomach.

~

                Because they are not students, they do not have sex in the study carrels: they do it at Young’s house that night, where there’s a bed and a locked door.

                It’s a huge turn-on, he discovers, that Young is so much stronger than him, more than can be explained away as appreciation for his body, but it’s a benefit, so he files it away as a kink he never knew about and enjoys it. Probably because he outweighs Rush by at least forty pounds, Young has to be encouraged to fuck him really hard, even when Rush is gripping his thighs and begging him.

                “You were really confident you would be better at long distance than me, that endurance was one of your strengths,” he says, when Young is pressed close and breathing into his face and seems to be doing his level best not to thrust too hard.

                “Oh it is,” Young says, and adjusts his hands on his hip and thigh, shifts his weight, and suddenly the angle changes and Rush is panting and swearing and squirming at how deep Young is getting and how unbelievably good it feels.

                “There, okay, yes, yes, keep doing that—“ He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to get control of his words as Young finally acquiesces to his demand to go harder. He does have it in him, apparently, and he’s goddamn good too.

                He can barely move when they’re done, leaving Young to do things like wipe him off and hand him his glasses. Young gets his own glasses and a book when he climbs back into the bed. Rush looks at the spine and scoffs.

                “What is the appeal of an absurdly long novel about things that never would have happened in a monastery and is fundamentally a vehicle for the author to ruminate on his own fetish for intertextuality?” Young gives him a look, settling back against a pillow.

                “I didn’t know you knew the word ‘intertextuality.’ Do you want a book to read?” His voice is extremely dry. Rush doesn’t, intent on enjoying his sated sleepiness, and puts his glasses on Young’s nightstand. After a while, Young clicks off his lamp, sets the book on the floor, and lies down all the way. Rush is only peripherally aware of this, half-asleep, but manages to move a little closer as Young’s arm wraps around his shoulders.

**Author's Note:**

> Young is reading _The Name of the Rose_ , which I always mean to read. I feel like it wouldn't be Rush's cup of tea.


End file.
